Poetry

He couldn’t wait to finish a film before he started the next, forty-three total plus the nine-hundred-thirty-minute tv series; refused to commit to any one lover, man or woman; fucked his actors in Munich hotels and Morocco châteaus; left a trail of broken hearts, one ex-wife, four wrecked Lamborghinis, two suicides; popped pills to stay…

There’s something casual about maple leaves. They’re almost mittens, in the first place. They refuse to stand for the national anthem. And when it rains, as it rained last night, a rain I listened to on the floor, a rain as delicate as a shoplifter, they’re moved by each raindrop and resist each raindrop, creating…

Psychic rib soaped clean, skeleton key to every lock in this house. Heartless, this place, as I’ve come to christen it. The wish then abandoned in the soap dish, near the wet bone china. Last Christmas saw us shivering at Lake Erie, stroking the battered nose of a dinghy. Abandoned. Bone- clean, its hull scoured…

One moment you were tossing me a football in the empty field behind your house and the next I was getting clobbered by a linebacker and run over by a safety. Forty years vanished in that instant when the pigskin touched my hands, which are still soft, and the defensive end straightened me out with…

They’d take her child away, unless he shed more weight. But every time he cried, she fed. More weight. My little niece too light, and snow not dense enough, I squeezed myself behind her on the sled: more weight. So thin her body cannot warm itself, she picks at the meager salad on her plate….

Samurai sword-fighting lesson, Tokyo We’re using the iaito or “practice sword” now               as opposed to the shinken or “live sword” which looks as though it can cut through lampposts                             and is “hungry for the flesh of its owner,” says smiling Sakaguchi-san through a translator,               which is why I’m getting lots of unintentional laughs when I…

Hanoi streets on their last demise do not shine like yellow bananas. The color of brown spotted ripe bananas for straight eleven eves, Coated with layers of night fumes. Seven women on their bicycles steer by a smoggy sundown. Threatening bombs like alarm clocks tick in my ears, As war fumes snatch the pretty red…

Is it too soon to murmur in her ear that I miss someone? The statue of liberty stands so still underneath a rainbow. She won’t mind if I play with the copper flame on her green torch. She can fool around with my liberated heart until it burns into ashes. Let me be the one…

Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…